It Looks Like We've Got Our Young Han Solo

The Coen brothers' latest movie, Hail, Caesar!, was ostensibly a star turn for Josh Brolin and George Clooney, with a flashy supporting cast including Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson. But a relative unknown made the biggest splash playing a naive Western star—and now he's playing one of the biggest gunslingers in space. Alden Ehrenreich has reportedly been cast as a young Han Solo in an upcoming Star Wars spinoff.

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The film, directed by The Lego Movie's Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, will likely be called Han Solo: A Star Wars Story. Not much is known about the plot so far, but it will likely focus on Han Solo's days before the rebel alliance. Miller tweeted an image of Han's blaster on May 4, AKA Star Wars Day:

Deadline reports that Ehrenreich is still in negotiations for the role, so nothing is set in stone (or carbonite). But considering a lengthy New York Times profile of him just went up calling him the next Han Solo, it seems like a done deal at this point. (Ehrenreich told the newspaper he couldn't say anything about the casting, but that he was a Star Wars fan.)

And if it weren't for a chance encounter when he was 13, he wouldn't be hanging out with Chewie on set. Ehrenreich made a silly video for a friend's bat mitzvah, and Steven Spielberg happened to be attending. The director liked his performance so much that he got him a meeting at DreamWorks. Since then, he's been toiling in smaller roles in film and television, but he's well known to the powers that be in Hollywood. "My feeling is that he is going to be a major player in movies," none other than Warren Beatty told the Times, correctly. (Beatty will be directing him in an upcoming movie.)

As proof, check out his hilarious scene with Ralph Fiennes in Hail, Caesar!, when his character is woefully miscast as an aristocrat:

And one of his character doing the action scenes that will take a slightly different form as Han: